Global Rallies Seek Equality

Women took to the streets on Saturday in cities across Europe, Africa, South America, and elsewhere to mark International Women's Day with demands for ending inequality and gender-based violence. Demonstrators called for improved access to gender-specific health care and equal pay, and advocated on other issues in which women are treated differently from men. The World Economic Forum's research found that at the current rate of progress it would take until 2158 to reach full parity, per the BBC. That's about five generations away. The AP reports demonstrations took place in nations including:

• Turkey: In Istanbul, a rally saw members of dozens of women's groups listen to speeches, dance, and sing in the spring sunshine. The colorful protest was overseen by a large police presence, including officers in riot gear and a water cannon truck. The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared 2025 the Year of the Family. Protesters pushed back against the idea of confining women's role to marriage and motherhood, carrying banners reading "Family will not bind us to life" and "We will not be sacrificed to the family." Erdogan in 2021 withdrew Turkey from a European treaty, dubbed the Istanbul Convention, that protects women from domestic violence. Turkey's We Will Stop Femicides Platform says 394 women were killed by men in 2024. "There is bullying at work, pressure from husbands and fathers at home and pressure from patriarchal society. We demand that this pressure be reduced even further," Yaz Gulgun, 52, said.
• Poland: Activists opened a center across from the parliament building in Warsaw where women can go to have abortions with pills, either alone or with other women. Opening the center on International Women's Day across from the legislature was a symbolic challenge to authorities in the traditionally Roman Catholic nation, which has one of Europe's most restrictive abortion laws.
• Spain: Protesters in Madrid held up big hand-drawn pictures depicting Gisele Pélicot, the woman who was drugged by her now ex-husband in France over the course of a decade so that she could be raped by dozens of men while unconscious. Pélicot has become a symbol for women all over Europe in the fight against sexual violence.
• Nigeria: In the capital of Lagos, thousands of women gathered at Mobolaji Johnson Stadium, dancing and signing and celebrating their womanhood. Many were dressed in purple—the traditional color of the women's liberation movement.
• Russia: The celebrations had a more official tone, with honor guard soldiers presenting yellow tulips to girls and women during an event in St. Petersburg.

• Germany: President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for stronger efforts to achieve equality and warned against tendencies to roll back progress already made. "Globally, we are seeing populist parties trying to create the impression that equality is something like a fixed idea of progressive forces," he said in Berlin. He gave an example of "large tech companies that have long prided themselves on their modernity and are now, at the behest of a new American administration, setting up diversity programs and raving about a new 'masculine energy' in companies and society."
• Ecuador: Hundreds of women marched through the streets of Quito to steady drumbeats and held signs that opposed the "patriarchal system" and violence. "Justice for our daughters!" some demonstrators yelled in support of women slain in recent years.
• Bolivia: Thousands of women began marching late Friday, with some scrawling graffiti on the walls of courthouses demanding that their rights be respected and denouncing impunity in femicides, with less than half of those cases reaching a sentencing.

(More International Women's Day stories.)